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So let’s just cut through that crap and remind ourselves briefly what we know about the plaintiff. Michael Mann was an obscure young physicist-turned-climatologist who rose without trace in 1998 with the publication in Nature of his ‘hockey stick’ chart showing dramatic and apparently unprecedented late-20th-century global warming. There followed almost instant fame, on which Mann has traded ever since — gaining tenure at Penn State University, drawing millions in public funding for research, often called on by the Guardian and the New York Times to sum up the state of climate science. Al Gore used a version of Mann’s...

Thank you also to all those who've made suggestions with respect to both the science and the law. The good advice I'm keeping close to my chest, the not-so-good ones we might publish here to throw Dr Mann's Big Tobacco lawyers off the scent. Speaking of the upcoming trial, Denyse O'Leary was a key part of the Internet pushback against Canada's squalid "human rights" commissions five years ago, and she has noted the banner above. Denyse has a post today about the Scopes Monkey Trial comparison, and writes: The choice of symbolism is interesting. The only thing one can be...

I'm sure even now some New York Times type is tutting that Buckley's movement has fallen into the hands of vulgar bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who lack his dash and élan. As it happens, back in 2000 some fellow in the San Francisco Chronicle made exactly that point about a lout called Steyn disfiguring Buckley's National Review. But, in reality, Bill was, as he would say, the fons et origo of a conservatism that came out swinging — sometimes literally, as in a famous TV encounter of 1968. Bill Buckley would have fought this present battle with...

Speaking of "befuddled effete new-male eunuchs", "Climate Science Is For Sissies Says World's Greatest Atmospheric Physicist". Well, okay, not quite. The actual headline is "Climate Science Is For Second-Raters Says World's Greatest Atmospheric Physicist". Our old pal James Delingpole is referring to MIT prof Richard Lindzen's testimony to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee at Westminster this week. This exchange with the ghastly, condescending Tim Yeo was especially choice:

This column originally appeared in the January 27th print edition of National Review: America is a land of acronyms, and, useful as they are, acronyms can quickly curdle into jargon. SLAPP stands for "strategic lawsuit against public participation" — i.e., using legal action to cow an opponent into silence, and withdrawal from the public square. It was coined in the Eighties by Penelope Canan and George W. Pring at the University of Denver, and in the Nineties they turned it into a book: SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out. And it proved so influential that by the Oughts various jurisdictions...

It is an interesting legal question whether a man who fraudently claims to be a Nobel laureate in a legal filing can, in any sense, be defamed.

As readers may know, National Review and I have an impending court date in Washington with Dr Michael E Mann, creator of the global-warming “hockey stick” and self-proclaimed Nobel laureate, for the hitherto unknown crime of “defamation of a Nobel prize recipient“. (You can contribute to our legal defense fund here; also, the TV rights to my forthcoming white Bronco chase are still available – we’ll be using a hybrid, of course). Forced by circumstance to take an interest in the latest developments on the climate-change “consensus”, I was interested to see this story, in which The New York Times...

Last month, a group of scientists headed by geologist Shaun Marcott launched the latest salvo in the global warming war. They announced that they had reconstructed the last 11,000 years of Earth climate history, based on various proxies, and had found that in the 20th century there was an unprecedented uptick in temperature. The Marcott paper was hailed by liberal media outlets; to cite just a few examples: * “We’re screwed: 11,000 years’ worth of ­climate data prove it.” The Atlantic, March 10. * “The modern rise that has recreated the temperatures of 5,000 years ago is occurring at an...

We wrote here about a recent effort by a group of climate alarmists headed by geologist Shaun Marcott to resurrect Michael Mann’s discredited hockey stick. The Marcott paper, as you would expect, received uncritical coverage in the liberal press. But it didn’t take long for climate scientists to begin taking it apart, as we noted in our post. Now Steve McIntyre, who was principally responsible for showing that Mann’s original hockey stick was a fraud, has gone over Marcott’s data on the key proxies he uses for 20th century temperatures, ocean cores. McIntyre found that Marcott and his colleagues used...

Steve McIntyre writes of the curious uptick in the 20th century, which doesn’t seem to be rooted in reality, or to have been in Marcott’s PhD thesis: While one expects a difference between NHX and SHX in the Holocene, the remarkable difference between NHX and SHX not just in the 20th century, but in the 19th century is a source of considerable interest. According to Marcott, NHX temperatures increased by 1.9 deg C between 1920 and 1940, a surprising result even for the most zealous activists. But for the rest of us, given the apparent resiliency of our species...

Flat-out: Empirical evidence illustrates that President Obama is undeserving of re-election.What do you think? Does Barack Obama deserve to be re-elected? Not based on what I see. (The following information was mostly gleaned from the Nuclear Counterarguments 16-book series.)Obama was elected to steer the economy toward recovery and he has not done so. Instead of learning from history where the Roaring Twenties teach us that austerity brings about a quick, robust and lasting recovery, he instead has followed FDRHoover’s Dirty Thirties strategy of stimulus spending, with the same failed results of a malaise without foreseeable end. (See #6 Austerity Versus Stimulus – What Is...

Phil Jones’ first instinct on learning about Climategate was that it was linked to the Yamal controversy that was in the air in the weeks leading up to Climategate. I had speculated that CRU must have done calculations for Yamal along the lines of the regional chronology for Taimyr published in Briffa et al 2008. CRU was offended and issued sweeping denials, but my surmise was confirmed by an email in the Climategate dossier. Unfortunately neither Muir Russell nor Oxburgh investigated the circumstances of the withheld regional chronology, despite my submission drawing attention to this battleground issue. I subsequently submitted...

Chinese 2485 year tree ring study shows shows sun or ocean controls climate, temps will cool til 2068 A blockbuster Chinese study of Tibetan Tree rings by Lui et al 2011 shows, with detail, that the modern era is a dog-standard normal climate when compared to the last 2500 years. The temperature, the rate of change: it’s all been seen before. Nothing about the current period is “abnormal”, indeed the current warming period in Tibet can be produced through calculation of cycles. Lui et al do a fourier analysis on the underlying cycles and do a brave predictions as well....

This week, some 27,000 freshly published research articles will pour into the Web of Science, Thomson Reuters' vast online database of scientific publications. Almost all of these papers will stay there forever, a fixed contribution to the research literature. But 200 or so will eventually be flagged with a note of alteration such as a correction. And a handful — maybe five or six — will one day receive science's ultimate post-publication punishment: retraction, the official declaration that a paper is so flawed that it must be withdrawn from the literature. It is reassuring that retractions are so rare, for...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, September 14, 2011 Contact: Paul Chesser, paul.chesser@atinstitute.org On September 2, lawyers for Dr. Michael Mann filed requests to allow them to intervene in American Tradition Institute’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against University of Virginia, citing Dr. Mann’s alleged personal interest in the disclosure of the records that he created or received as part of his employment there. Among the legal filings are a letter from Dr. Mann to UVA, as well as letters from four of his scientist colleagues to UVA president Teresa Sullivan, which urge the university not to provide the records sought by ATI. Despite talking points designed...

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, after surviving 15 years, mostly spent on life support. It reached its peak in Bali in 2007 at the annual UN gabfest, had a sudden unexpected collapse in Copenhagen in 2009, and has been in a coma since. Kyoto had its real beginning at the 1992 Global Climate Summit in Rio de Janeiro. I missed that great party but George Bush the elder went and signed up for the United States. The language of the Global Climate Treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), was vague enough to not be completely objectionable...

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who first said ‘Laws are great, in theory, but…’ As his other project, the University of Virginia, gets further backed into a corner on the ‘Hockey Stick’ records it is spending upwards of a half a million dollars to keep from the public (even though the public paid for and has every right to them), we now see what Charlottesville radio host Joe Thomas of WCHV likes to note in this context as “UVA getting its Nixon on”. This time with a little help from its friends outraged that laws would be applied to...

Gosh, it can’t be the money, can it? There must be something else going on. The juxtaposition is priceless. From Tom Nelson: UVA spends $500,000 on lawyers when it would cost only $8,000 to deliver public documents?Commonwealth Foundation – Mann: From Transparency Champion to ‘Bully’ Victim UVA has been resisting (spending about $500,000 on outside lawyers for the effort) a similar, previous request by Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, who is investigating Mann under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. Climate e-mails and public records – Roanoke.com That the e-mails are public documents seems clear. Mann, while a professor at the school,...

RICHMOND – Delegate Bob Marshall needs to severely revamp two bills he’s introduced in reaction to the University of Virginia withholding controversial climate change research, members of a House subcommittee told him Thursday. The Manassas Republican wants public employees to be fired if they willfully withhold documents that are subject to disclosure via the Freedom of Information Act. His target: UVA employees who withheld climate change documents from him last year. But the bill Marshall offered before the FOIA/procurement subcommittee of the House general laws committee contains language he didn’t intend. It allows a judge to terminate the employment of...

Junk Science: Democrats in Virginia are trying to stop their attorney general from probing climate fraud carried out by university researchers at taxpayer expense. Are they afraid of finding the inconvenient truth? It's not the crime, it's the cover-up, as the saying goes. In the case of former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann and his supporters, it may be both. Not only did Mann participate in perhaps the greatest scam of modern times, but he may have also have fraudulently used taxpayer funds to do so. At least Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli thinks so, and has been...